Film, Film Review

REVIEW: Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) dir. Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls

To take arms against a sea of troubles

by

Much like Genghis Khan and his thirty-fold generational spread of descendants into the modern world, Shakespeare’s influence has much found its way into literature and film to this day. Consider Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 5. The first line — “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow — is the name of a popular contemporary book by Gabrielle Zevin following the lives of two best friends who make video games together. The penultimate line — “Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury” — inspired the title of William Faulkner’s breakout novel, a multi-perspective narrative taking place in the 1900s South. Aside from the Cambridge backdrop in both books, their literature parts and glue are not like one another, but still are somehow influenced by the one man and legend.

This same soliloquy is uttered again in the documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet, which tells how a performance of Hamlet came to be on the Grand Theft Auto Online platform during the pandemic. I say this with little invocation for the inflammatory, but there are a few reasons why the premise doesn’t pique as revolutionary as it would have, say, ten years ago.

  1. Anyone who has had aspirations of improving editing skills set to succinct, punchy music choices and are familiar with the impact of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts AMVs (e.g. me) would already know that this type of medium exists.
  2. The pandemic stirred creativity and cabin fever in the same pot, which produced a lot of cool and zany projects. Broadway plays by professional actors were performed on Zoom. Celine Song, who would later garner success for Past Lives, streamed her performance of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull by using characters on The Sims 4.
  3. if you’ve seen Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, you can see the inspired color palette between the film’s imagined Verona Beach and GTA: San Andreas.

Still, I would never claim that any coordinated effort on GTA is an easy feat. As someone who plays video games with a responsible Puritan spirit (paying off my mortgage first in Animal Crossing, dutifully plucking and watering my crops every morning in Harvest Moon), the appeal of GTA feeds into a primordial desire. I try to succinctly explain to my friends in my latent adult-phase of the GTA phenomena: “I…just wanna be bad!”

The game is recognized for reckless violence and criminal tomfoolery, though the consequences are still real. Kick an enemy, you have ten guns pointed at you. Steal a car in front of witnesses and get ready for the wild escalation of becoming the game’s most wanted fugitive in two minutes. It’s this Wild West environment that becomes a challenge for theater actors Sam and Mark in Grand Theft Hamlet, who have been playing GTA Online and decide to pull off, to their knowledge, the first Shakespeare performance in the game.

What we see in the documentary is entirely composed of gameplay: clipped and stitched POVs from Sam and Mark as well as documentarian Pinny, who joins the game to serve as a third-person perspective for neutral shots (Pinny is also Sam’s partner in real life). After committing to the idea that Shakespeare in the park abandoned amphitheater might be kinda neat, they try to cast real-life players to join — all part of the natural course of putting together a play. But in watching these events leading up to the in-game performance, I have a sort of pitting feeling that’s worse than dying at the hands of obnoxious teenage trolls: these spur-of-the-moments and spoken dialogue are just paved for some sort of affected narrative.

I’m not in the business of investigative unveiling of certain presentations, but in a world where you can do almost anything, it feels hollow when the film, which I imagine has a lot of footage to sift through, condenses what they wanted as a cohesive storyline, not knowing that it can also feel canned. Grand Theft Hamlet might work for those who are in awe of using this kind of work, but it won’t do any favors for those who are curious to see how gameplay and stageplay go hand in hand, how hard GTA could be, or how particularly creative these guys are. For example, I would have loved to see even five seconds of how Sam was able to acquire $250,000 to purchase a business condo for the cast meetings — and let me tell you, it’s not through a lemonade stand! While it’s likely that the actors have played GTA prior to this idea, I wished that it felt like a GTA expert that wanted to do Shakespeare instead of actors who wanted to perform Shakespeare in an unexpected platform (though now, I can again promote Sing Sing as a great example of “magic within the crevices”).

But hey, I have a heart. How could I watch this and not be entertained? Twitch streamers are beloved for a reason, and speaking for myself, I could watch someone play a video game all day. How we decide to interact with NPCs, how to choose what we want to do in the storyline, and how far the limitations go – there is so much instant dopamine in the confined world of possibility, and the concept of Grand Theft Hamlet satisfies that itch – or trigger finger. Sam and Mark take on their challenges of casting with stride and humor, which is commendable given that a theater director trying to pull off stage directions in GTA, or anyone trying to organize a group of strangers, will no doubt find themselves losing their shit. 

Violence is a thematic cast member in Hamlet. Murder and assault, both intentional and incidental, is repeated by the actors in Grand Theft Hamlet like a nod to Shakespeare’s work. Perhaps it makes more sense to re-enact a Fast and Furious installment in GTA, but the heart of Hamlet is the emotional resonance of prophetic betrayal and power. The fear of being killed by another player lingers in the air, ready to quickly strike as an urge coming on or an accidental button press, but it’s the lines and sonnets that connect strangers of different regions and backgrounds together. The pandemic enforced confinement, but it doesn’t stop the world from spinning, people to bond, Shakespeare from being recited, and for the new GTA to come out this year.

Grand Theft Hamlet
2024
dir. Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls
89 min.

Opens Friday, 1/17 @ Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport

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